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Event

Speculating on Biodesign in the Future Home | CHI 2021 Workshop

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Pat Pataranutaporn

Pat Pataranutaporn

Friday — Saturday
May 7, 2021 —
May 8, 2021
5:00pm — 8:00pm ET

About the workshop


The home is a place of shelter, a place for family, and for separation from other parts of life, such as work. Global challenges, the most pressing of which are currently the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change has forced extra roles into many homes and will continue to do so in the future. Biodesign integrates living organisms into designed solutions and can offer opportunities for new kinds of technologies to facilitate a transition to the home of the future. Many families have had to learn to work alongside each other, and technology has mediated a transition from standard models of operation for industries.

These are the challenges of the 21st century that mandate careful thinking around interactive systems and innovations that support new ways of living and working at home. In this workshop, we will explore opportunities for biodesign interactive systems in the future home. We will bring together a broad group of researchers in HCI, design, and biosciences to build the biodesign community and discuss speculative design futures. The outcome will generate an understanding of the role of interactive biodesign systems at home, as a place with extended functionalities.

The workshop is held as part of the ACM CHI conference, and will bring together participants to build a community around biodesign and HCI. We invite participants from research, practice and industry, who are interested in speculative futures of interactive biodesign systems, to participate in our workshop. We are interested in hearing diverse voices of those who combine knowledge in areas of biological science, HCI, speculative and design fiction. This conference is led by academics from the Design Lab and Affective Interaction Lab at The University of Sydney and the MIT Media Lab.

Participating

Participants are expected to submit short position papers  by February 21, 2021 (2-4 pages, in ACM extended abstract format). The position papers are submitted through the workshop EOI. The position papers may provide contributions and critical thinking perspectives aligned with the workshop theme. Research on interactive biodesign systems is a growing area of research and innovation and we invite participants to share their thoughts, reflections and experiences in this area relevant to home and work. Submissions will be juried by the organizers based on relevance.

We aim to build new collaborations through this workshop. Findings and a summary of opportunities identified for this field will be communicated through subsequent publications and participants will be invited to contribute to these. A summary of the discussions will be posted on the workshop website.

In this workshop, we explore how previous work may be extended as home and workplaces overlap. The outcomes will deepen our understanding of interactive biodesign systems with meanings attributed to home and work.

We invite participants to explore the following themes and questions with us:

  • Understanding the context: how may the future home be different, due to global challenges and advances in technology? 
  • Opportunities for intervention: can biodesign be a non-speculative intervention in this context, and with the current state of biodesign? 
  • Speculating on future interventions: What do they look like? What will they accomplish? How can speculative interventions be mapped to coexist and relate to each other?

Organizers

  • Dr Phillip Gough Design Lab, School of Architecture Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  • Jack Forman, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
  • Pat Pataranutaporn , MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
  • Dr Leigh-Anne Hepburn ,School of Architecture Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  • Dr Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, School of Design, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
  • Clare Cooper, School of Architecture Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
  • Angela Vujic, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
  • Dr. David Sun Kong, MIT Media Lab Community Biotechnology Intiative, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
  • Raphael Kim Queen Mary University, London, United Kingdom
  • Pattie Maes ,MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
  • Professor Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
  • Dr Misha Sra Computer Science , UCSB, Santa Barbara, California, United States
  • Dr Naseem Ahmadpour School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
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